After Fury Over 2010 Peace Prize, China Embraces Nobel Selection

BEIJING — Two years ago, when the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, the government reacted with contempt and fury, scrubbing the announcement from the Internet, condemning the award as a “desecration” and calling it a Western propaganda tool intended to insult and destabilize the ruling Communist Party.

Government officials even retaliated against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, denying visas to Norwegian dignitaries and delaying shipments of Norwegian salmon for so long that the fish rotted before they could clear customs.

But all that seemed forgotten on Thursday, when word came that another Nobel, the 2012 literature prize, had been awarded to another Chinese citizen, the internationally renowned author Mo Yan, and China erupted into something close to a national celebration. The state-run CCTV interrupted its prime-time broadcast to announce the news; the nationalistic Global Times tabloid posted a “special coverage” page on its Web site; and in a glowing account, the state-run People’s Daily prominently wrote that the prize was “a comfort, a certification and also an affirmation — but even more so, it is a new starting point.”

The award will probably act as a huge boost to China’s national psyche, which has long suffered from a sense that its cultural accomplishments, at least in the eyes of the West, are overshadowed by its economic prowess.

“This will be embraced as an indicator that China has arrived in the world,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The contradictions between their response to Liu Xiaobo’s prize and Mo Yan’s prize will not trouble them in the least.”

The award represents something of a shift, too, for the Swedish Academy, whose members choose the Nobel literature winner.

During the Soviet era, it consistently gave Nobels to Soviet and Eastern European dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky and Jaroslav Seifert. Similarly, the only two previous mainland Chinese winners under Communist rule, Mr. Liu and Gao Xingjian, who won the literature prize in 2000 and who gave up his Chinese citizenship for French citizenship, are both dissidents.

Indeed, the academy has rarely, if ever, awarded one of its prizes to a writer or scholar embraced by a Communist government. The Academy’s deliberations are shrouded in Vatican-style secrecy, but officials insist that neither politics nor any diplomatic or economic pressure from China played any part in the decisions.

“Basically, it’s quite simple,” said Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Academy. “We are awarding a literary prize, and it’s on literary merit. The political fallouts and effects don’t enter into it.

“That doesn’t mean we regard literature as unpolitical or that this year’s prize winner isn’t writing political literature,” he continued, speaking of Mr. Mo. “You can open almost any one of his books and see it’s very critical about many things to do with Chinese history and also contemporary China. But he’s not a political dissident. I would say he is more a critic of the system, sitting within the system.”

Mr. Mo, 57, is hardly a tool of the Communist Party; much of his work is laced with social criticism, and he is admired by readers of Chinese literature abroad as much as he is hugely popular in his own country. But he does not consider himself political, and his decision not to take a stand against the government — as well as his position as vice chairman of the state-run Chinese Writers’ Association — has drawn criticism from Chinese dissident writers.

In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the lyrical techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for “Red Sorghum,” an epic that takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh conditions in rural China, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou.

“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives,” the Swedish Academy said in the citation that accompanied the award, “Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

Photo

Mo Yan signed autographs at a book fair in Frankfurt in 2009.Credit
John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The son of farmers, Mr. Mo was born in 1955 on the dusty plains of China’s eastern Shandong Province, where much of his fiction is set. A teenager during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, he left school to work first on a farm and then in a cottonseed oil factory. He began writing, he has said, a few years later while serving in the People’s Liberation Army.

The author’s given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” is actually a pen name that reflects the time in which he grew up.

“At that time in China, lives were not normal, so my father and mother told me not to speak outside,” he said at a forum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. “If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak.”

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Mr. Mo’s books have touched on many of contemporary China’s most sensitive themes, including the Cultural Revolution and the country’s strict family-planning policies.

One of his most famous books, “The Garlic Ballads” (1988, published in English in 1995), describes a peasant insurrection against government malfeasance, telling it in a semi-mythical fashion that avoids criticizing specific government officials.

But the book came in the aftermath of the 1989 student unrest, and was at first deemed too biting and satirical to publish, according to Howard Goldblatt, Mr. Mo’s American translator. Mr. Mo instead had the book printed in Taiwan; it was published later on the mainland.

Critics in the West have lavished praise on his work. “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” a huge, ambitious work narrated by five animals who are reincarnations of a man controlled by Yama, the lord of the underworld, “covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience,” almost like a documentary of the times, the Chinese scholar Jonathan Spence wrote in The New York Times in 2008.

In its citation, the Swedish Academy noted that many of Mr. Mo’s works “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”

Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, said that Mr. Mo was part of a generation of post-Cultural Revolution writers who began looking at Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, through new eyes outside the party line.

“For a very long time Chinese realism was of a socialist realist persuasion, so it had to be filled with ideological and political messages,” Mr. Hockx said.

“But instead of writing about socialist superheroes,” Mr. Mo has filled his work with real characters, Mr. Hockx continued, while at the same time portraying rural China as a “magical place where wonderful things happened, things that seemed to come out of mythology and fairy tales.”

Still, some have criticized Mr. Mo’s failure to take a political stand. Last summer, he was publicly denounced for joining a group of authors who transcribed by hand a 1942 speech by Mao Zedong. The speech, which ushered in decades of government control over Chinese writers and artists, has been described as a death warrant for those who refused to subsume their talents under the Communist Party.

He was also criticized for attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 after Beijing barred a number of dissident writers.

Mr. Mo later gave a speech at the fair that provided a window into his complex thinking.

“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” he said. “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 12, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Past Fury for Peace Prize, China Embraces Nobel Choice. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe